These four stories, originally part of the collection More News from Lake Wobegon, were recorded live on A Prairie Home Companion. "These days I live in big foreign cities—New York and Copenhagen," wrote Garrison Keillor in 1989, when A Prairie Home Companion was no longer in production and he was a jet-setting cosmopolitan. "But I think about America every day and imagine a town, an avenue of old frame houses, a boulevard of tall trees, a June night, lawn sprinklers swishing across the grass.... This is the American neighborhood of childhood comfort and fantasy, of teenage ambition, and of the tenderness and misery and splendor and comedy of marriage." To return there, Keillor reissued this nostalgic collection of Lake Wobegon monologues: "Rotten Apples" (October 20, 1984); "O Death" (November 17, 1984); "The Wise Men" (December 15, 1984); and "A Trip to Grand Rapids" (May 17, 1986).